Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Wednesday June 14, 2006 @11:11AM
from the my-oh-my dept.

Polarism submitted a good article about
net neutrality that is currently running on Ars. It's a good explanation of where the pieces of the problem are, the government issues, the industry issues, etc. Worth a read.

Over and over again the anti-net neutrallity rant is based on the presumption that web site operators don't already pay for bandwidth. I don't understand why this continues? While most people don't know the nuiances of negotiating a high-dollar agreement with a carrier, there are a great many people out there who pay $10-50/mo for simple web hosting. Surely these people know that both ends of a HTTP connection are already paying. I'd like to know if this is an intentional distortion perpetuated by the telecoms, or if this is an honest misunderstanding?

Why does every tech article, without fail, have more political jibes in it than tech comments? I just started reading the comments under this story, and this is only the first one I saw. I'm sure it won't be the last.

Unfortunately, the Internet has become a political battleground now, and the whole Net Neutrality issue has polarized opinions among techies and non-techies alike. Most people with a technical bent see Net Neutrality as necessary, to keep everyone on an even footing. The non-technical can't understand the fuss, because they lack the knowledge of how the technical side of the Internet works and how it's paid for. Let's face, how many people look closely at their phone bill and wonder just what it all means? All they know is, the phone keeps working if I pay the bill.

Now, you won't find a more opinionated person than your average Slashdot user. We squabble over Linux vs. Microsoft, Oracle vs. MySQL, Google vs. Yahoo!, etc. Even those fights are now becoming more political, because they involve legal challenges, laws, foreign governments, and the like. I think it's safe to say that now that the political wind is blowing so strong through IT, Slashdotters wound be hard pressed to saty out of the fight. So don't expect the political diatribes to die down in the foreseeable future. It's the price we're paying for our new technological culture.

Why does every tech article, without fail, have more political jibes in it than tech comments? I just started reading the comments under this story, and this is only the first one I saw. I'm sure it won't be the last. Slashdot should just save itself the trouble and redirect all of its traffic to MoveOn.org or DNC.org.

I don't understand. You opened an article about the fundamental rules of the Internet being rewritten by a bunch of technically illiterate politicians, and you're surprised to find people are discussing politics?

WTF do you expect people to be talking about?

I share your nostalgia for the days when politics wasn't a major topic here. Now please wake the fuck up.

You're right in that this is a political thread. What I find annoying are these non-sensical jibes that people mistake for political discourse and mod them "funny" or "insightful" when they're neither. Brainless snide remarks about "This Administration" and "The President" and "nukular" are beyond overdone.I know I didn't express the root cause of my annoyance very well, but the ugly tone of most of the responses to my comment show the point pretty well. No one speaks against the groupthink because they get

You talk about how oppressive "This Administration" is, when [criticism isn't tolerated on slashdot]

It depends on what the criticism is about. People who think issues involving the current administration (or indeed, the overall political direction of congress + corporations) have multiple nuanced sides all equally deserving of credibility just might be in the wrong crowd here on slashdot. This isn't Huffington's site, but it's more Huffington than Limbaugh no doubt.

> Why does every tech article, without fail, have more political jibes in it than tech comments?

Because almost nobody's bothering to *think* about the technology - MoveOn has a political agenda and no technical clue, and the telco guys have a knee-jerk reaction about always arguing regulation and money when anybody challenges them, rather than explaining the technical points they're making to politicians and reporters who don't have a clue about technology, and Dave Isenberg, who should know better, is

I manage a tech support call centre, and we get MANY calls that go something like this:Customer: "I'm getting an 'invalid username or password' error, is your service down?"Agent (after checking logs): "No, you're typing the wrong username."

Other thrilling examples include "So, is my modem my hard drive or is it my screen?", "What's an X?", "What is a phone?", and "What is a keyboard?" (This last one was from someone who spoke fluent English and said she only used the internet for Yahoo mail, and after 5 solid minutes of explanation using phrases like "The thing your hands touch when you type an e-mail" she still couldn't grasp the concept).

Why is this relevant to net neutrality? People have no idea what the internet IS, let alone how it works. You can't expect understanding of a "complex" issue like network neutrality from someone who thinks he must be connected to the internet because his computer is on.

Senators are not necessarily more technically inclined than anybody else. Believe me, honest misunderstanding, or just lack of understanding, can account for FAR more than you think.

Senators are not necessarily more technically inclined than anybody else.

No, but they have a staff, and they pay impartial experts to explain things to them, where necessary.

There has been plenty of instances of highly technical legislation going through congress before, and speeches were they discussed the issues in rational and accurate terms. You can't claim many of those same people went stupid all of a sudden.

If you get all your political news from the media, you are missing out on the great sources of information that senate committee hearings are. Sure, lobbyists with questionable experts might have started the ball rolling on this legislation, but as usual, the list of (I believe unpaid) experts who testified at the committee hearing [senate.gov] on the subject is impressive:

Mr. Vinton Cerf
Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist, Google

Mr. Walter McCormick
President and CEO, United States Telecom Association

No, but they have a staff, and they pay impartial experts to explain things to them, where necessary.

Damn. That's the funniest thing I've read in a while. I'd call you hopelessly naive about how the Congress works, but that would be an insult to hopelessly naive people everywhere. Trust me, no Congresscritter is going to pay for an expert opinion when a lobbyist will pay for it and give him/her/it a free dinner at The Palm or Galileo to boot. Never mind that that opinion will be about as impartial as a Red

There has been plenty of instances of highly technical legislation going through congress before, and speeches were they discussed the issues in rational and accurate terms. You can't claim many of those same people went stupid all of a sudden.

Yes only problem is they do go stupid all of a sudden, we've had senators pass stuff then later admit they had no clue what it is they passed or what it ment to anything. Also, All to often they admit to passing something without ever reading the proposal or having

Like my grandpa said, "When you got no clue, shut up and let those talk that have one."Not you. The senators.

Quite seriously, let's imagine I'm charged with making a decision about... say, a law regulating the use of artificial insemination in cows. Not quite my topic. What would I do?

I would HIRE someone to tell me why it's good or why it's bad. Preferably someone who's neither from one end of the lobby chain, nor the other. Hell, I'd hire TWO guys. One from each side of the chain. Both should tell me why

>Senators are not necessarily more technically inclined than anybody else.> Believe me, honest misunderstanding, or just lack of understanding, can>account for FAR more than you think.When I called my Congressman's office and asked his position on Net Neutrality, the aid I spoke to told me this:

She said that basically the "Net Neutrality" thing was just a small portion of the legislation and had been "blown out of proportion". She also said that their position was that the legislation was/really/

I'd like to know if this is an intentional distortion perpetuated by the telecoms, or if this is an honest misunderstanding?

While the optimist in me would love to beleive it's the latter, based on the people who are ant-net-neutrality, namely big telecomms and cable companies, it's impossible for me to accept that these people are simply ignorant of how it works. If they are then they certainly don't deserve the positions they hold within their companies.

> I'd like to know if this is an intentional distortion perpetuated by the telecoms, or if this is an honest misunderstanding?

See http://savetheinternet.com/ [savetheinternet.com] -- the telecoms are spending millions on a [dis]information campaign, they keep whining about people not being charged when the peering agreements, hosting agreements and ISP bills charge all ends of the transaction. They cite "competition" when most people have two or fewer choices for broadband... Or the "our network" bit when we paid them over

It is just about money. But I'm afraid that with this kind of discussion I can end up with 3 minutes long page loading from Wikipedia meanwhile my neighbor downloads ten high resolution porn clips...:-( Sad discussion, isn't it?

It doesn't help that 75% of the pro-net-neutrality articles I see on Slashdot and elsewhere don't even mention the "double-dipping" nature of net neutrality. Some even further confuse the issue by comparing a tiered internet to "first-class flights" or toll roads, which is totally false. Unfortunately, there seems to be very many persuasive people arguing against it, and very few persuasive people arguing for neutrality.

Lets use an example. I'm looking at Toogle from the east coast. My ISP is Comcast, and (for sake of argument, I have no idea who it really is) Toogle is hosted on a west coast provider, say, Covad. My HTTP request is sent from my system to my ISP's node. The ISP's node then routes the packet to it's next hop, which might be on an AT&T network. The AT&T node then routes the packet to another node, which might be in a completely different network, and so on and so forth, until the packet reaches Covad. The response is performed in much the same way, until it reaches my system. Now, yes, both Comcast and Covad are paid for this transaction, from me in my ISP contract, and from Toogle in the hosting agreement. AT&T's complaint is that they have to carry this traffic for free across their network, and get nothing from this particular transaction.

But Comcast and Covad are paying for their upstream connections to AT&T. Do you think Comcast and Covad connect to the Internet for free? Everybody who connects pays their upstream provider. It's not like either Comcast or Covad are one of the big backbone providers.

On a smaller scale, what if I had a son who was old enough for me to charge him rent. Let's say part of his rent went towards using my DSL. So my ISP is carrying both my and my son's traffic. Should they charge me extra because both of us use their service? Of course not. The bandwidth is bought and paid for regardless of where the traffic is coming from and who is generating it.

The same applies to the whole of the Internet. Some companies want to double-charge for their bandwidth, and i

On a smaller scale, what if I had a son who was old enough for me to charge him rent. Let's say part of his rent went towards using my DSL. So my ISP is carrying both my and my son's traffic. Should they charge me extra because both of us use their service? Of course not. The bandwidth is bought and paid for regardless of where the traffic is coming from and who is generating it.

A tad off-topic, but I guarantee you that you signed a TOS that says you won't resell the bandwidth. Obviously that doesn't appl

Yes, everyone pays their upstream provider. I really think this is the telcos being greedy and wanting more money.

With the backbone providers, here is what must be taken into consideration: each provider allows the traffic of the other providers to freely pass through their network in exchange for free passage on the other providers network. If the large telcos want to start charging for that traffic, they will raise costs for everyone using the internet.

This points out the real issue in this debate: what is happening is that the peering agreements are starting to get lopsided: say that peer A's subscribers own a lot of consumer access lines, and peer B's subscribers own a lot of VoIP and video serving lines. According to the agreement, A and B happily carry each other's data at no charge. However, A is getting swamped with data coming from B, and is having to install more routers and switches to handle the incoming data, increasing their costs while thei

So where does it end, who does not have an upstream connection that needs to be paid for?

Essentially, anyone who plugs straight into an IXP like MAE-East, PAIX, or EIX. That is to say, divisions of Verizon, AT&T, Switch & Data, etc (I stress that it's just divisions within those, not the companies as a whole; Verizon residential DSL still needs an upstream to get to the IPX, and that upstream may or may not be Verizon). At that point, you're practically (even if not nominally) peering with the res

...AT&T's complaint is that they have to carry this traffic for free across their network, and get nothing from this particular transaction.

No they don't, at least that's my understanding as of now. AT&T is free to block that traffic, but then again all the people who connect to AT&T are free to stop doing business with them. Perhaps AT&T is wineing about the free market and wants to use the government to force Google to pay no matter what. Perhaps Google wants to use the government to

...the second in line just has to forward the packets on around, without charging for that traffic.

This is not so at all. Each network has a peering agreement with the other networks. The second in line and the first total up the amount of traffic they send and receive from one another and then one pays the other the difference or they call it even based upon the contract they've signed.

AT&T's complaint is that they have to carry this traffic for free across their network, and get nothing from thi

Net neutrality is about TV broadcasting and oddly cable bundling. In the end consumers place high value on TV and phone, I think we can generally take this as a given. They place a much smaller value on internet (per packet or transaction). As a small example of the economics involved let's say that a user pays $0.05/minute ($30/month and 3 hrs of calls per month) to use the phone $0.02 per minute ($70/mo and 60 hours of televison) for television service and $0.003 per minute of broadband internet servic

As someone who used to be a network architect in a Tier 1 global telco I can say only two words: Utter bollocks. Get a clue would ya?.

Traffic is carried between two autonomous systems on the Internet if there is a transit or peering agreement. In your example either Covad or Comcast is paying for transit from AT&T. Otherwise they will not get the routing table entries for each other. AT&T is definitely not doing it for free. If Covad and Comcast were directly connected it could have been either a peering agreement under which they exchange traffic at no cost to each other or once again a transit (one of the buying from the other).

What is happening here and what Net neutrality is all about is that in the US the public peering points used to be run by big telcos like MCI (f.e MAE East or MAE West). MCI and friends deliberately made them suck really bad around 7 years ago so that people switch to buying transit. The telcos themselves switched to private peering agreements. Thus, the tier 1 cartel creation was complete (it started to coalesce around 3-4 years prior to that). As a result in the US an ISP like the ones you mention usually has 2-3 transit connections for which it pays and very few private peerings where it exchanges traffic.

Compared to that in EU a similar ISP has 2-3 transit connections and 20-30+ peering agreements across public peering points. The private peerings can be counted on the fingers of one hand. This changes the overall traffic pattern considerably and most of the traffic is going across peering points not across a tier 1 telco like AT&T. As a collegue of mine jokingly put it a few years back: "The UK Internet backbone consists of one floor in a building in Docklands". In other words the Linx has become the backbone. As a result the transit ISPs can no longer hold their customers for ransom with QoS threats the way the Tier 1 cartel is doing it in the US.

Futher to that, the fix for the no-net-neutrality is trivial. Someone with the resources to do this who does not have the conflict of interest (the way MCI used to) should reestablish the public peering points and run them using the same model and rules as the successfull ones on this side of the pond like Linx, DGIX, etc. The resources to run this are a drop in the ocean for the likes of Google and Yahoo and it will restore the healthy network economics in less then half a year. In fact it will be cheaper than moaning and trying to graft congresskriters.

And if they do not do this the telcos will get them by their balls and their wallets will quickly follow. Frankly, I would be surprised if we do not see Google Peering or Yahoo Peering by the end of the year

Traffic is carried between two autonomous systems on the Internet if there is a transit or peering agreement. In your example either Covad or Comcast is paying for transit from AT&T. Otherwise they will not get the routing table entries for each other. AT&T is definitely not doing it for free. If Covad and Comcast were directly connected it could have been either a peering agreement under which they exchange traffic at no cost to each other or once again a transit (one of the buying from the other)

I said in my original post that "I used to be a network architect in a Tier 1 telco". It's been 5 years since. I am no longer in this part of the industry so many thanks for the updated numbers and the corrections.

I agree with you that US and EU have diverged a lot over the years. It started at least as far back as 8 years ago if not earlier. 7 years ago we had seagulls coming across the pond and screaming at us that "public peering is crap, we need to switch to private". That has not changed. The majority

Peering agreements only exist between two providers who pass roughly equal amounts of traffic between eachother. It's just an agreement that say: I'm passing 1000TB of traffic to you, and your passing 1000TB to me, so we'll carry each others traffic for free.

If one of the companies loses market share, they will not renew the agreement. Take a look at what happened with Level1 and Cogent (IIRC)

The key to stopping these problems would be to impose rigorous common carrier status regulations on general bandwidth providers. Allow everything from political speech to hate speech to pornography. The only thing that would get exempt would be IPTV so that IPTV providers could organize content packages according to their customers' tastes.

For the love of God, get rid of all of the bullshit regulation at every level that allows governments to meddle in the prices of bandwidth packages and the ability of property owners to negotiate with the telecoms. Take away EVERY barrier that keeps new players from entering the market, or that even increases the cost of entering.

And I ask one more time. Does anyone want this Congress, with its meth-addled ADHD-afflicted child-level attention span for details and consequences to regulate complex technical issues when most of it are MBAs and lawyers? I wouldn't, and I despise Verizon. I switched to Vonage and would stay with Vonage even if cost more than Verizon or AT&T because it's not AT&T or Verizon, but I sure as hell don't trust this bunch of coin-operated cronies to regulate the Internet.

Take away EVERY barrier that keeps new players from entering the market...

The biggest barrier is the last mile. You don't want every Tom, Dick and Harry digging up the streets to lay fiber, so localities make agreements with a few players. The problem is, some of these players like the phone company and the cable giants, has historically made exclusive agreements and done their best to keep the public from knowing. (Time Warner has packed town hall meeting with employees so the citizens wouldn't be able to speak)

So, in steps the State and Federal governments. Legislation is proposed to limit the big players, since they have defacto monopolies. These players, sensing that the new law would cost them money, send their paid lobbists to increase their monopoly status. Hilarity ensues.

You don't want every Tom, Dick and Harry digging up the streets to lay fiber, so localities make agreements with a few players

So dig up the streets once and lay some nice big conduit for every tom dick and harry to pay to install in. When its full, you'll have received enough to dig the streets up again (several years later) and lay another nice big conduit. If the company fails they get a choice of pulling their lines out or selling them to the city to get the installation cost back, and the next company

That's the way it ought to be, but I've seen examples of where the incumbant politician used all his polical capital to get some neat infrastructure installed. (A pedestrian bridge) Just before it was installed, he was voted out and the new mayor took credit for the whole shebang.

Say you are the mayor of a large town/city, and you get pipes laid that everyone can use. You'll have to spend money. Some other politician can outspend you getting elected knowing that he can sell off your infrastructure to

I hope people can start to figure this out. The pipes are paid for. We're all Leasing the bandwidth on both ends. Over the last few years i'm sure the comusmer market has paid for the pipes. I garuntee they're making money. This is just a bully tactic to force people to pay for the "privalige" to use their pipes.
The Confusion is almost all on their side of the argument. It would be nice if congress would look at how things work before they try to pass laws about technology.

Looks like we might get some action from Congress after, that's heartening, I just worry that in regulating this aspect of the net, it could try and get overzealous and use it as precedent to regulate other parts of it too.

My understanding is that currently a communications company can try to bill someone (like Google) whose traffic gets routed thru their network (and they do not provide the connectivity at the end points), but then Google can tell them to go to hell. Well, if they block Google traffic all their customers will leave, so now they want the government to force Google to pay. So now the 'Google side' has turned things arround and decided to get the government to force neutral access no matter what.

The truth is that we are probably better off with no new laws at all. Let the companies who screw with traffic go broke, and let the market force neutral access and not the government.

Not quite how I understand it. Currently tier 1 providers can't charge google directly, they have peering arrangements where smaller providers have to pay. They aren't trying to get the government to force google to pay, they are trying to get the government let them charge google directly.

What makes you think the market can force neutral access? Remember Betamax? Undeniably the better format technically, yet the market chose the inferior format. The free market isn't magic. If people are too stupid to regulate something correctly, what makes you think they can acheive a better outcome through random purchasing? Besides, we are dealing with oligopolies here, there is no free market. Adam Smith's invisible hand only works in certain limited circumstances, libertarian rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding.

My understanding is that currently a communications company can try to bill someone (like Google) whose traffic gets routed thru their network (and they do not provide the connectivity at the end points), but then Google can tell them to go to hell.
I've posted before to this argument, but perhaps it merits another mention since the message clearly is NOT getting through. My dad lives in a town of about 50,000 people that is more than 100 miles away from the nearest large metro area. Bellsouth, his pro

My understanding is that currently a communications company can try to bill someone (like Google) whose traffic gets routed thru their network (and they do not provide the connectivity at the end points), but then Google can tell them to go to hell.

I might be wrong, but my understanding is that the main enemies of network neutrality are the last mile providers. After all, that's the only place where bandwidth is limited as a practical matter, and therefore where competition cannot easily "route around" d

The Bush administration (and the FCC) has already decided to throw out neutrality. That means action by both the Senate and the House is necessary for anything to change. The House already voted against the Markey amendment (by 269-152, I think), so there doesn't appear to be _any_ chance of saving net neutrality.

I might have this wrong but this is how it goes.First, the House net neutrality vote was for a net neutrality amendment to a larger bill(COPE). They didn't include it obviously.

Now, the Senate is considering their version of the bill. Their version may or may not include the net neutrality provision. Talking Points Memo is keeping a tally of where Senators currently stand [talkingpointsmemo.com].

Ideally, the Senate includes it in their version of the bill. Then, the bill will go to conference to iron out the differences between th

What a good bit of the debate does not discuss is that a number of players, Verizon in particular, want to bring TV into your house over IP (via a fiber connection) in order to compete against cable. This is the holy grail of the telecoms industry: bundled services.

In general, competition for cable is a good thing. However, what is not often discussed is that TV content would come over a dedicated connection from verizon that you the subscriber would not have access to directly (at least, this is my understanding). The really really bad thing about this is that it would let verizon do what companies in the mobile space are doing: mixing transport (delivering the bits) with content control. In the mobile space this has been a terrific failure for most customers as the wireless companies control the delivery channel and the portals (what applications and ring tones are available).

I think the critical issue here is that we need to insist that the delivery pipe from verizon is a level playing field and that others can delivery TV content if they so choose. The pipe would still be seperate from normal internet access but I would be able to choose my HDTV provider who would let me pick the "geek" bundle of channels (plus oxygen for the wife) and who would undercut both verizon and comcast.

Verizon and the cable companies are natural monopolies: there is no way around that. Verizon is sinking tons of money into deploying FIOS: they should be compensated for that deployment. However, that compensation should not comes with strings attached - they should bill the customer for access to a high speed pipe dedicated to video and that's it.

The problem is people on average won't pay for a dedicated high speed pipe they will pay for TV and telephone. Verizon doesn't want to sink all the capital into a pipe if they can't be assured of being the sole provider of TV or telephone (preferably both) on that pipe. If Disney/Google/whoever can undercut on both items them no one will pay Verizon two diddlies for their pipe.

Exactly - something I've said all along in this argument. Big sites like Google or Ebay aren't going to pay. If AT&T or Qwest or Comcast throttle their connections they can just throttle it on their end too, or drop off completely. Make a big news announcement that your ISP, AT&T, is responsible for slow access to Google and recommend customers switch to a better service. That would be a PR and Sales disaster for the ISP.

I think net neutrality is a good idea in theory, but I am VERY afraid of

If you let the "free market" work it out, AT&T will just do whatever the hell it wants with its pipes. Which includes extorting Google. This isn't a free market we're talking about, so we have to legislate in order to make sure AT&T plays fair.

Ah, but it is a free market, at least in most places. I don't know of many places that only have one avaliable ISP. We don't have terribly good coverage where I live, but we have Qwest, Comcast and several wireless providers. As long as there is a choice no major ISP can charge more.
The other thing is I don't see how anyone can extort Google or any other major content/hosting provider. People pay for an ISP to connect them to the sites they want to see. If their customers suddenly find Google hard to

AT&T wants to charge Google for carrying Google Net traffic, even if Google isn't directly connected to AT&T. Let's say Google is connected to GCom, which is connected to AT&T, and Google users are connected to UCom, which is connected to AT&T (of course there are really many more intermediaries, but the system works exactly the same). Google pays GCom for its traffic, while users pay UCom for their traffic. GCom and UCom each pay AT&T to carry their traffic. AT&T gets paid its portion by Google and its users through those intermediaries. AT&T gets paid twice, once in each direction, for every transaction, without marketing the traffic: Google does that risky part.

AT&T just wants to doublecharge Google, because 1: Google has money, and 2: AT&T has a blackmail toolkit, including the huge network used by so many people, and Congress. If they just raised their rates, the traffic would flow over the redundant Internet to their cheaper competitors. So they're getting their cartel^Windustry to add a new kind of charge that everyone will collect, killing competition.

What does the telecom carrier industry plan beyond just ripping off everyone paying for our distributed Net access? To start, they're planning to suck up the "fast lane" with video, IPTV, to "compete" with cable companies and independent distributors. Including YouTube and any other upstart not in the telco club. Charging competitors outside the cartel too much to stay in the game, just like they killed the DSL competition. They'll also squeeze out any upstart VoIP competition, so their core voice business can keep its 20th Century domain intact.

Of course, along the way, they'll kick the crap out of any independent media they carry which tells the truth to the people. With voice, video and data under their privileged control, as well as the government, how can they lose?

Once again, The good doctor boils to down to the brass tacks. Who is this Doc Ruby? He just has this way of explaining complex issues in an easy to grasp manner. Can I fit in anymore accolades and cool idioms?

Gushfest mode off.

I know some have called you a dumbass, but damnit, you have this excellent manner of calling bullshit. Sure you can be abrasive sometimes, but nobody's perfect.

I don't post on Slashdot to make friends, though it does seem to happen anyway:).Geeks used to have a pretty safe community, resisting the bullshit of the outside world through an unconscious strategy of alienation and antisocial habits. But since HTML dropped the barriers to entry to geek culture while making geek subjects some of the most powerful and valuable in the world, geekery has been flooded with unprecedented bullshit.

I've been lucky to grow up in geek culture since it wasn't for kids. And to hav

You can't compare that unidirectional model to the actual Internet. AT&T's backbone is the resource the other networks/gateways pay to access. Even where AT&T pays to connect to other networks, it doesn't pay as much as other networks pay to connect to it.That's the whole point. AT&T gets both UCom and GCom to pay AT&T for access to the same traffic. If anything, AT&T is getting paid twice already, and wants to get paid again for the triplecharge.

If the Corporate guns manage to modify the internet away from what it has now become in terms of the overall freedom of information flow, and general anarchism, I think we're going to see massive massive hacker incidents worldwide in numbers so large even the most in-depth IDS/IH techniques will simply fall flat.

Of course, I also think that this would be short-lived, and if the powers that be really do want to change the neutrality of the internet, they will, and that's that.

I wrote Illinois Senator Dick Durbin about this and got a message back, which I'll include below. Take a look at how he fairly carefully doesn't say what his real stand is.Durbin has taken $37,000 in the past 6 years from telco PACs. Not a fortune, but might cause him to vote to favor Bill Daley, brother to the mayor of Chicago and shill for SBC ne AT&T.

Having written both of my state seneators several times, and my representative even more, I can say that this pretty much par. Any politician willing to write down his stance on paper is crazy. What if they change their position later on? What if the position they stated is not in line with yours? Once an opinion has been expressed publicly it is very hard to take it back. The fact is that yes, they all have a stance that they will likely stick to (unless outside influences pressure them, like lobbyists, ma

When 1gb/s of traffic goes down a 2gb/s pipe, we're all happy. If it's Qwest's pipe, then they'd like more traffic, or may think this is over-engineered, but there's no outage.If we start paying a premium for some bandwidth, then a 2gb/s pipe may have 1gb/s of premium paying traffic on it, and all the receivers of that traffic will be happy. But there also might be 100gb/s of non-premium paying traffic. From the carrier's standpoint, that's not a problem. Who cares if other traffic can't get through? T

Joshua Marshall's Talking Points Memo has a list of where senators stand on Net Neutrality here [talkingpointsmemo.com]. It still needs work, so if you have any information about your senator, you can contribute that info to TPM and they will update the list.

More importantly, if you don't like where your senators stand, give them a call.

The real problem that I don't see many people talking about is how this hurts the little guy (aka the next great thing). Google, Yahoo, eBay, Microsoft... they all have the money to pay the proposed extortion fees.

But if I come up with the next YouTube, I not only have to pay for my bandwidth, I'll also have to pay fees to all the other providers so my site isn't slow for their customers. This model empowers the telcos to keep Google on top and YouTube on bottom.

The FCC has provided protection of network neutrality up until just recently. All that is being asked is that it be reinstated so the telcos can't act on their short-sighted and greedy urges. So enough with the 'regulation is bad' crap. Do you really want to trust the telcos to do the right thing without it?!?

Get informed. Get irate. Call your representative in the Senate. If you don't, you might regret it later.

We're going about this whole Net neutrality thing all wrong. I mean...all us techie, geeky types *know* why net neutrality is an important thing. We need to address this issue in a way the public can understand.Net neutrality will help us stalk Registered Sex Offenders (TM) and will help catch child predators on myspace.com. It will also help relieve gas prices and slow down illegal immigration.

We have to present the story in a context of issues that actually have significance.

The problem is that the average bandwidth per customer of these ISPs is going up (because they are downloading more).The solution is to increase costs. ISPs should stop offering "Unlimited" and start adding either bandwidth limits (use more than that and you get a bill at the end of the month) or traffic shaping (I dont mean discriminating by protocol, I mean that you get full speed on all protocols untill you have used a certain amount of bandwidth then you go down to a slower speed on all protocols, my IS

I am not sure if it does come down to greed. When I first heard about the whole net neutrality saga I was of the very strong opinion that it was quite obviously the way forward, the net had to be neutral to continue to allow it's free and unfettered nature.

I began to read up on this net neutrality looking for information and expanding my opinion. I personally came to the idea that net neutrality isn't all its cracked up to be. I understand the arguments for it, but I cant help but think that different typ

I am not sure if it does come down to greed.... if the network was totally neutral would each of my game requests be given the same priority as someone requesting a web page where a second of lag would not matter a jot?

In reply to this idea, I ask... do you suppose Comcast cares whether your game playing is slow? My guess is no - that is not one of their concerns. If almost all of their customers were huge game players, then maybe, but that is not the case. Few people care (or will even notice) if it tak

Install a packet filter on your end that would analyze and prioritize VOIP and game traffic over HTTP traffic. You're more than welcome to due with your packets as you wish, but someone else's packets should have the same priority on the network as a whole.

You're free to shape the traffic coming from and to you as you please. It's not like your provider didn't already shape it, but you can of course do it according to your own preferences.Because, one thing is for sure, without neutrality, you'd get exactly what you do NOT want. Webpage providers, especially ones like Google or Amazon, will pay the information highway tax. So webpages come in without delay. Game servers (at lease private game servers that host games like Counterstrike or other multiplayer gam

This is another case of misunderstanding network neutrality. Your example has nothing to do with it.

1) If you want a low-latency connection for gaming, nothing today stops you from doing that today. Contact your local telecom and ISPs and ask them what latencies they offer and at what price. There's nothing wrong with doing that, it happens today all the time.

For example, I work for a telemedicine company and our clients are hospitals who use low-latency high-bandwidth pipes, and they pay extra for that. They prioritize the audio/video traffic over the HTTP requests.

2) This would be a net neutrality issue if Microsoft paid Comcast to prioritize XBOX Live traffic over Playstation traffic. Or if Comcast bandwidth capped World of Warcraft traffic unless Blizzard or their customers paid them extra.

1. Big web sites should pay because they're such a load on us.
Big web sites, like Google, are, in fact, the reason that any ISP large or small even has residential and small business services. Without these portal and the like, it would be like selling a pipe that doesn't connect to a water supply.

2. We have to do this to assure the majority of our customers aren't unduly effected by a few big downloaders.
Traffic shaping has been around for years. The small ISP I worked for regularly throttled down P2P traffic, using nothing more than a couple of Linux boxes. This argument is a non-starter.

What it boils down to is that Congress is once again whoring itself to telecom giants who, rather than evolving their business models to fit the Internet, are using their money and their knowledge of just how willingly politicians will prostitute themselves. These guys are simply electronic mobsters, using IP traffic as their weapon of choice to push their weight around. It's despicable, but expected. What's sad is that Congress is so gleeful in selling out the average Internet user. There truly is no shame, no sense of civic responsbility or any ability to understand the incredible information tool which is now threatened by ugly old behemoths.

What it boils down to is that Congress is once again whoring itself to telecom giants who, rather than evolving their business models to fit the Internet, are using their money and their knowledge of just how willingly politicians will prostitute themselves.

Yes. And though I'm probably going to get modded into oblivion for saying this, the net neutrality bill was defeated along party lines with Republicans selling your internet to corporations.

As a case in point I share a house with 5 others, people use VOIP, people browse pages and I personally play a lot of online games.

You mention VoIP, but are you aware that Comcast has been known to reduce the bandwidth available for other VoIP providers that their subscribers use... in the areas where Comcast offers IP phone service? I use Comcast cable internet, and I use Vonage, and I'm fine because for now, Comcast doesn't offer phone service in my area. But as soon as they start offering it, I'm l

Do you want to pay $100 a month for your 10Mb broadband connection?
Hell yes. I would much rather pay $100 a month to access the internet unrestricted than to have my ISP decide which websites are going to be fast and which will be slow.

Yes, right now the ISP's are getting paid. $19.95 a month for DSL in many cases. Offered at a loss to build market share and penetration. Even cable systems charging $40-$60 a month aren't really paying the whole bill.

DSL for $19.95 won't make money back for almost 24 months of the roll out.

However, Cable makes money the instant they hook you up.

How do I know this? I used to work for a 3rd party major ISP that leased DSL lines and Cable connections.

So, basically the telcos sold something they really couldn't provide, and that's the justfication for locking you into a contract?

Pretty much yes... It was an unproven service for some (especially Bellsouth... SBC roll outs weren't as bit of a problem) and the ISP ended up paying the telcos too much Central Office fees for the initial installation that there had to be some sort of threat to keep the customer from cancelling and go through the troubleshooting process to make sure DSL could be installed. Does

My Qwest DSL worked the day it got turned on til (June 2001) the day I moved with the lone exeption of when a nasty thunderstorm killed power for about an hour or so. Something to be said for blowing a couple of billion investor dollars on stupid wasteful infastructure products:)

With the size and opulence of the new Shaw cable building in my city, I can quite confidently call BS on your claim that broadband must be sold at a loss for $50/month. Hell, it's only $40 CDN here and Shaw is raking in the dough. OK, there's a chance that their cable TV subsidizes their internet, but they've always been perfectly willing to sell an internet connection *without* cable to me.

Offered at a loss to build market share and penetration. Even cable systems charging $40-$60 a month aren't really paying the whole bill.

I call BS. Sorry, no, I do not believe the idea that paying $50/mo is accepting charity, or that I should feel lucky for the privelige of paying to go on the Internet.

If Comcast et. al. aren't happy with the bandwidth business, perhaps they should just leave. Somebody else will come in to collect my $50/mo., I'm willing to bet on it. Bandwidth is cheap and it gets c

I'm not buying it. Maybe the promotional $19.95 rates are below cost, but $50/mo isn't. If you look at independent broadband providers, they charge ~$50/mo, and they don't have the cash reserves nor the alternative revenue streams that the bigger companies have to allow them to take a loss on service.The reality is that the consumer broadband market is like many other markets...they oversell their product with the knowledge that most customers will use far less bandwidth than they pay for. Sure, most peo

That's actually relative. If you call my cell when I'm roaming (or if it were another provider and I was out of my plans' minutes), I pay to receive the call. If I have ISDN BRI circuits, I have to pay per minute charges for phone calls in or out (including voice). Then there are things like 800 numbers that allow the caller to not pay and the receiving party agrees to pay any toll/LD charges.But the point here is that these are all based on established contractual agreements. AT&T is trying to chan